Friday, 20 March 2009

Josh Alves has produced a new comic book set in a "Wild, Wild, West" type version of the "Old West" and called "The Adventures of the Araknid Kid". The first episode has a flea villian from Ritz Nabiscov's Flea Circus.

In good comic book style, the villians "Kracker & Flea", were formed when their travelling show was hit by a meteor. Kracker is a shape-shifting brute made of cracker crumbs and his flea became enlarged and super-smart.

There was a long development of the characters, Josh told me that Araknid Kid was developed out of a character created in high school called BugBoy. Kracker had started out as a research professor not a showman.

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

In this latest find of industrious fleas from 1832, the writer is not in anyway impressed by the exhibition. The Athenaeum was a weekly periodical published in London between 1828 and 1923. Thanks to google books for their digitisation of this paper.

The AthenaeumJournal of English and Foreign Literature, Science, and the fine artsNo 219 London, Saturday, January 7, 1832 Price four pence.

Our weekly gossip on literature and art

"But our fashionable friends are spending their wonder on 'The Industrious Fleas' in Regent Street; a strange mania, for there is really nothing in the exhibition worthy a moment;s admiration the fleas have not been taught and trainedl there has been no patient labour bestored on their schooling; they are simply fastened ny a hind leg to a little car, modelled out of the pith of elder, and the struggles of the creatures to escape give motion to the carriage. A flea just caught would do the same thing."

Wednesday, 4 March 2009

Thanks to Lee Jackson from the Cat's Meat Shop I've discovered that London's Science Museum houses a bamboo flea trap. The tubes were heated up to attract the fleas inside, once there the fleas stuck to the sticky substance contained within.

Monday, 2 March 2009

Stephen Fry quizzes his contestants on their knowledge of Flea Circuses on the QI quiz show. In a episode called "Flora and Fauna" he is joined by John Sergeant, Jimmy Carr, Jo Brand and Alan Davies.

Q: What was the biggest destroyer of human fleas? Asks FryA: Vacuum Cleaners answers John Sergeant.

However Sergeant then goes on to incorrectly comments that if a human being had as powerful legs as a flea that they could jump over the Eiffel tower. The flea can jump 80 times its own height but if you scaled that up to human sizes then it would not be as high. The reason for this is that muscle strength scales with cross section but mass would increase with volume on a cubic scale. This would mean that a human with flea legs could jump (cuberoot of 80)squared i.e. approx 18.5 times their own height. Taking the UK average of 175cm, which multipled by 18.5 is approx 32m which although very impressive is only 1/10 of the height of the Eiffel tower.

I thought Mr Fry was rather over exuberant with regards to the one rare example of the flea band (who were glued to a heated tray) where as the majority of flea performances were about pulling things, something that does not put any more strain on the flea than a horse pulling a cart. It sounded like he got all his information from Wikipedia but the clips from Pathe News were very good.

Sunday, 1 March 2009

Belfast based children’s theatre company, Cahoots NI, take to the road this April with The Flea Pit – an original and quirky production that takes place in a miniature, mobile theatre space. The tiny theatre, holding just 15 people, has been magically created to present this delightful Flea Circus.

Dates: 07 April - 18 April Age Range: 4 - 11 Duration: 20 minutes

These magnificent mini-beasts have performed across the USA, Europe and Ireland amazing people with incredible feats of weight-lifting, trapeze and high-wire. Come along, be amazed and delighted by this sensational circus troupe featuring live music, loads of laughs and magic tricks galore.

Polka Theatre is one of the few venues in the UK which is dedicated to producing and presenting work for young audiences. Over 100,000 children a year come to Polka and are inspired, stimulated and enaged by the theatre they see there.